at the water's edge

An eight by eight foot slab of salmon-tinted cement, dissected into four rectangles by two strips of wood. This slab sat just outside the family room of my Southern California house, and as I stood on its warm cement in the bright sun, it became a home of my design.

As a young child, place meant the most basic knowledge, that of belonging to a family and exploring or reflecting on the world from that base. That family was contained in a typical track house of the late 1950s. But the place was not a home, so I created my own.

Each of the four rectangles was a room - a kitchen, a living room, a bedroom, and a bathroom. All of the furnishings were imagined as I stepped around them among the rooms. So my first experience with place was the one I could devise from a square.

Here you could say that I was creating space, that perhaps I needed a space of my own. Certainly place and space are interrelated concepts; however, I didn't need space. I needed another world that could take me away from the base or place in which I was born into. And being a somewhat cautious child, I wouldn't have ventured very far to create a new place.

The cement slab was the first tiny step that has led me to all the other places in which I have found (or sent) myself beyond that Southern California house. As a young adolescent, I began to articulate the thought that I was born in the wrong place. Why didn't it snow at Christmas? Why did the sun give me headaches? Why were the most prevalent trees dry, skinny palms instead of massive, fragrant pines?

On the other hand, I loved the Southern California ocean and its brilliant sunsets that signaled the end of a day basking in the sand and rolling in the waves. In fact, that is the only thing about that place that I don't look to change - facing west when I look out over an ocean's horizon. East coast shorelines haven't got it right.

But I didn't grow up on a beach. I grew up in a valley that reflects the sun so strongly that it bleaches away any character. Living in the valley had to be all about imagination, to fill in the whitened voids. Even now, when I visit my parents, who still live in that same house, I work hard to keep that imagination going. I'm afraid it will be sucked out of me in that place. Sadly for my parents and me, I never stay long.

On the salmon tinted slab, I dreamed, I designed, I wondered. It's a place in my memory in which my understanding of place and its significance to my life began. It is also where I first linked place to inspiration and innovation.